


Take my bunny - please.

by Elf (Elfwreck)



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Gen, Lists, Meta, Nonfiction, Plotbunnies, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-26
Updated: 2011-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:33:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23152543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf
Summary: I've been pondering the nature of prompts and plotbunnies for a while.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Take my bunny - please.

Less than 48 hours to [sign up for Junetide](https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHVtSjN4bEprLXFfdXBTU1daNks2cFE6MQ)! [](https://junetide.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**junetide**](https://junetide.dreamwidth.org/) is an original works, fic or art, gift exchange. I've been pondering the nature of prompts & plotbunnies for a while, and this seems a reasonable context to bring it up, because Junetide prompts don't have the advantage of canon to draw on.

I think of plotbunnies as inspirations for stories. This is substantially different from "descriptions of stories." When I hand out plotbunnies, in comments or at fests or whatever, I'm hoping that each of them (well, some of them; I do tend to hand them out in large clusters) strikes someone as interesting enough to kick off a story. I don't care if the story winds up with any resemblance to the plotbunny itself; the goal is to _get stories made_ , not to get "the story that was kinda-sorta in my head when I wrote down the bunny" made. If I want that story written, I need to write it myself, or maybe coerce someone else into writing it; that's not what plotbunny drops are for. (IMHO. YMMV.)

Plotbunnies are different from the short word-or-phrase prompts that are obviously just idea-starters. The prompts "Kirk, McCoy, bubble bath" and "Lucius Malfoy, antagonism" are not plotbunnies. With those, it's obvious that whoever offered the prompt is not, cannot be, invested in the particulars of the results. (Sometimes I wonder if those are more common because of that disconnect—there's no chance of "doing them wrong"—or because they're just easier to make.)

Plotbunnies should have enough substance to build from. They need the bunny-farmer to have an idea in mind—which the author isn't going to know or try to match. A good plotbunny immediately sets off a cluster of what-happens-next possibilities, blooms in the mind like a flower. The only problem is that the recipient's flower often doesn't look anything like the one the author of the plotbunny had in mind, and prompt authors sometimes get upset at this. (I deplore this. If the prompt inspired a story, THAT'S GREAT, more stories yay.)

I repeat: the proper use of a plotbunny is as inspiration for a story. Which doesn't mean the plotbunny is going to accurately describe the resulting story; the inspiration might go off on a twist that, from the reader's perspective, has little resemblance to the initial bunny.

 **Evolution of a plotbunny**   
Initial Plotbunny: _A scientist publishes in an obscure academic journal that he's found the secret of entering & manipulating people's dreams._

That story could focus on the difficulty of getting published with such an outlandish premise, or the backlash he gets from his university after publication, or the patients who underwent the weird dream therapy for the research paper. Or… the story could talk about what happens next in the world:  
_A group of geeky outcasts has found the secret of dreamwalking, and uses it for revenge on everyone who's ever slighted them._

Author starts thinking about that, and considers a story about one of the victims. The new bunny might be described as:  
_A woman is convinced her nightmares are caused by a creep she dated once, but can't prove it._

Then the author considers how she could get away from her attacker:  
_A machine allows dreamless sleep, and is first hailed as a solution to nightmares, but the users slowly go insane from lack of REM brain activity._

Since tech didn't fix the problem, maybe an organic solution is called for:  
_A team of skilled dreamwalkers set themselves up as the Dream Police. Regular authorities refuse to acknowledge they or the problems they address exist._

New cops means new criminals, right?  
_Certain criminal syndicates have dreamwalkers who creep unobtrusively into the minds of bank workers to get account numbers._

…and so on. Five spinoffs from the original bunny, which could be used as throwaway background data for any of them. If it were my bunny, I'd be ecstatically happy with any of those stories. (I hereby release this bunny into the wild. Go, Dreamwalker Bunny, and find a home. Or a dozen homes. Curl up in Gotham City and pit yourself against Batman's willpower; hop over to the Torchwood institute where they'll mistake you for an alien invasion; hide in the back seat of Sam & Dean's car and join the side of the angels. Just get out of my head; I have enough bunnies in here already.)

On to the prompts:  Suitable for [](https://junetide.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**junetide**](https://junetide.dreamwidth.org/), or for inspiring other Junetide prompts, or for twisting into fanfic prompts. Mix & match. Play.

**ANY GENRE:**

  1. Two best friends run away from home together and find themselves on opposite sides of an organized crime syndicate war.
  2. A woman is convinced her children are plotting to kill her. She's only partially correct.
  3. A man starts receiving odd items in the mail every day—a paperclip, two thimbles, three pencils—always small, always one more than the day before.
  4. A pair of identical twins have been secretly raised since birth as a crime team; public records only exist for one of them.
  5. A man starts hallucinating when he reads—instead of seeing the words, the letters move around, becoming stick figures who act out the scenes. He doesn't know if something real is happening or he's just going crazy.



**SCIENCE FICTION:**

  1. Clones are grown in vats, often for organ-harvesting. As long as it's never been conscious, it's legal to do anything with a clone body. A "clone's rights" group starts waking up all the clones.
  2. The Crime Institute is charged with making sure colony planets have the correct level of criminal activity to balance creativity and paranoia. 
  3. The Orgasm Drive is perfected: the psychic energy released at orgasm is enough to warp space to allow ships to reach other planets. 
  4. It's mandatory for everyone's DNA to be on file in the Gene Library.
  5. A sentient-plant alien visits earth and makes a contract with the redwoods to protect the forest lands.
  6. No two alien races are cross-fertile, but there are sets of three that can interbreed.
  7. A race of technologically-advanced sex-shifting aliens will only negotiate with trans people, who suddenly become Important Assets to governments all over Terra.
  8. Some human colonists on a multi-species world convince one set of aliens to provide them with sex on demand, claiming this is an innocuous gesture of polite affection. The trouble starts when someone figures out that one group of aliens has been using human children for the same thing.
  9. AIDS was an alien virus designed to weaken humanity's immune system enough to allow the psychic powers virus to work on us.
  10. Someone from a heavy-G world visits a light-gravity world, finds s/he can glide so far it's almost flying; decides s/he has become a god.



**HIGH FANTASY:**

  1. In the longstanding war between elves and humans, humans are winning because they're so much more numerous; elves are often made into slaves. 
  2. A despotic king is murdered by a vampire, whom the council immediately declares king in his place, because all the potentially legit heirs are worse.
  3. A half-elf, half-dark-elf is rejected by both of her families and adopted by druids.
  4. A retired adventurer buries a treasure in the forest… one coin or gem under every tree. 
  5. A magical spring gives magical powers to those who don't have them and takes them from those who do.
  6. The aftermath of a wizards' duel to the death includes a strange flower that grows nowhere but in the scorched earth of the magic circle.
  7. A dragon is convinced that he has a human soul and is in the wrong body.
  8. A young girl is cursed by a powerful evil mage. After much effort, she gets it removed. He puts it back. Repeat several times, until she's suicidal—but the curse won't let her die.
  9. Three swashbuckling witches decide to take over the high seas.
  10. A promiscuous centaur becomes caught in human political maneuverings during wartime.



**URBAN FANTASY/PARANORMAL:**

  1. The fey have come out of Avalon after their long sleep; they take one look at the modern world, and boy are they pissed.
  2. After a strange celestial event (eclipse during lunar perigee, a new nova visible, very rare comet returns, etc.), magic starts to work; mages quickly become the world's new dictators.
  3. The Dragon Pilots are the newest branch of the Air Force; they'll need to prove themselves against enemy fighter planes.
  4. A hoarder's very cluttered home is actually a carefully-arranged mechanism that opens a gate between worlds, which the police find to their detriment when they get careless with a search warrant.
  5. The government hires song mages to surround protests and chant mild confusion into the crowds.



**HORROR:**

  1. The 13 Days of Halloween is a long-lost tradition in which one inflicts 13 increasingly-scary pranks on one's enemy, and the 13 seals the receiver's doom.
  2. The photocopier used to photocopy an eldritch text has become cursed; all its future copies are warped somehow.
  3. The "crazy weaver lady" who makes such lovely fabric has been secretly weaving spidersilk into all her work, and her army of spiders can find and feed on anyone wearing it.
  4. One state declares that every abortion & miscarriage requires a death certificate—this public, legal acknowledgment of life pulls the unfinished, not-ready-for-this-world infant souls into the land of the living. The entire state becomes haunted.
  5. [Zombie ants](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/pictures/110303-zombie-ants-fungus-new-species-fungi-bugs-science-brazil/) (warning: strong picture; don't click if you have bug triggers), infected by a strange fungus, march across the land; the fungus mutates to infect other species.




End file.
